The official account of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has pointed to evidence many conspiracy theorists believe shows that he was shot twice, from different directions.
New documentary JFK: The Smoking Gun has come up with a new twist on the conspiracy theory, claiming that a Secret Service agent was the man who fired that shot by accident.
JFK: The Smoking Gun claims that George Hickey, a Secret Service man riding in the car behind JFK, accidentally fired his weapon on November 22, 1963.
It alleges that a cover-up was then carried out to save the blushes of the agency whose main role is to protect serving and former U.S. leaders – leaving the many loose ends that have long raised suspicions.
It is said that as much as 75% of the American public do not believe the official account of JFK’s assassination.
The new documentary is based on the work of Colin McLaren, a veteran Australian police detective, who has undertaken a four-year investigation into the killing.
Colin McLaren’s theories are based on the work of Howard Donahue, who himself has spent two decades probing the assassination and had his findings documented in Bonar Menninger’s book Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. Bonar Menninger and Colin McLaren spoke yesterday about the film at the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles, California.
Central to their case is the claim that Agent George Hickey and his Secret Service colleagues had been out partying the night before Kennedy’s motorcade drove through Dallas.
To compound the problems the hungover agent faced, Colin McLaren says he has found evidence that George Hickey had not been properly trained to use the AR-15 gun he was carrying that morning.
“It was his first time in the follow car, his first time holding the assault weapon he was using,” the Huffington Post reported Colin McLaren as saying.
The theory is that as the assassin opened fire, George Hickey grabbed his own gun. But when the whole motorcade shunted to a halt, the agent was jolted by the sudden stop and accidentally pulled the trigger – firing a bullet straight at the back of JFK’s head.
Colin McLaren said he believes George Hickey’s AR-15 was loaded with different from the ammunition used by Lee Harvey Oswald, who the Warren Commission declared in 1964 to be the lone gunman in the assassination. That, he claims, explains what they believe are the different ballistic profiles of the two bullets that struck Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald was himself assassinated before he could stand trial over the killing.
Bonar Menninger insisted that they do not believe that George Hickey intentionally fired at JFK. Rather, the Huffington Post reported him as saying: “This was a tragic accident in the heat of the moment.”
Both of them do allege that the government moved swiftly, with the help of JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy, to cover up the Secret Service’s involvement and save the agency from embarrassment.
JFK: The Smoking Gun will be broadcast on the Reelz Channel on November 3. A spokesman for the network said: “What makes McLaren’s investigation different than those that came before it is the fact that he had all the evidence, facts and eyewitness testimony from fifty years ago as well as modern forensic technology.
“McLaren’s findings are a far cry from the fanciful conspiracy theories that usually surround this assassination.
“His case is methodically constructed from simple logic and available evidence using time-tested investigative techniques to solve the crime; including key archival photographic evidence, medical reports and bullet science.”
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